Creating individual network address books for users on Snow Leopard Server is straight forward enough. Unfortunately, creating a global address book on Snow Leopard 10.6 Server isn’t as easy as it should be, but it can be done. Here’s how to create a group address book that can easily be shared with all of your Snow Leopard Server users.
1. Open the WorkGroup manager on your 10.6 Server and create a new group in LDAPv3/127.0.0.1 , for example: group name: abglobal. Now add several users to this group.
2. Change to the “Local Directory” by clicking the “global” icon and click Groups. Click “view” at the menu bar and select “Show system record”. Then you will see “the AB Read-Write Groups” in groups.
3. Click “add”. At the top of pullout sidebar, change it to “LDAPv3/127.0.0.1″, you see will the “address book” group. Drag it into the “AB Read-Write Groups” groups.
4. Save your changes in Workgroup Manager and restart Address Book service in ServerAdmin.
5. Open your AddressBook application on a client computer and in the preferences click add to create a new account. account. Enter the user name and password for one of the users in the “address book” group. Now enter the address to your server- “http://you-server-address:8800/principals/groups/name_of_group/” in server address.
10. Click create and you’re done.
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Jackpod on August 25th, 2010 at 2:22 pm says:
works great on the mac address book, thanks!
how can i view this on the iphone? tried it and it does not seem to recognize the path to the shared address book. any ideas?
osxupgrade on August 28th, 2010 at 8:44 am says:
Not sure, haven’t tried it with an iphone. I would imagine that your dns would need to be fully qualified and available and addressable outside your router/firewall.
Jackpod on August 30th, 2010 at 12:07 pm says:
hi osxupgrade… dns is good and available to the outside… it just seems like that path does not get saved like it does with the address book on the mac… any other thoughts?
osxupgrade on August 30th, 2010 at 5:58 pm says:
you did punch a hole for port 8800 in your router? Try that. If the port on the router for the address book server isn’t open, it won’t address the server.
Joel on October 10th, 2010 at 8:30 am says:
Thanks to your great tutorial, my client got the shared address book they wanted. Keep up the good work and I look forward to reading more OS X Server articles from you in the future.
fallingsky on October 14th, 2010 at 12:08 pm says:
Sorry, I must be missing something. I’ve been wrestling with this for a while. I’ve followed the steps provided and populated the group on the server. My challenge is finding the contents (Address Book group) I want to share in a newly created client account. Is there a specific location on the server where the shared group should be stored?
Claude on October 18th, 2010 at 10:27 am says:
Thanks, worked!
Erwin on October 22nd, 2010 at 11:08 pm says:
Thanks – it worked well
Casper Buisman on October 23rd, 2010 at 5:48 pm says:
I get a 404 error on the address http://you-server-address:8800/principals/groups/name_of_group/
Casper on October 23rd, 2010 at 6:27 pm says:
If my group is 5 people, Can I still have a thousand addresses in my global address book to share?
Or must every single one have an account on the server? Must the 5 people in the group all have local accounts (e.g. 504) or can they be directory accounts (e.g. 1025)?
Erich on October 25th, 2010 at 7:41 pm says:
So I have the new server 10.6.x all working per instructions, and it works from the other intel machines. But, how do I get address book on my PPC machines (10.5.x) using this?
Jerry on November 9th, 2010 at 4:19 pm says:
I’m with Casper… I get a 404 error…. still trying though
Nick on December 16th, 2010 at 2:55 pm says:
It works – kind of. It isn’t shared at all
Brian on January 6th, 2011 at 9:55 pm says:
There must be some missing details here…i get the 404 error too…
Pierre Lemieux on February 24th, 2011 at 10:02 am says:
See this article for instructions on how to connect your iPhone/iPad to the server: http://houseofmac.wordpress.com/2011/01/13/how-to-configure-iphone-for-carddav-on-kerio-ios-4-2/
amolli on February 27th, 2011 at 7:36 am says:
G-R-E-A-T … Been dealing with this for soooo long
Mike on March 2nd, 2011 at 1:38 am says:
I got this working ALMOST perfectly. Clients connect and keep in sync quickly and consistently. Problem is getting our iPhones to even SEE the data. I’ve used the iPhone Configuration Utility to set up a cardDAV connection but fear the Principal URL is not sticking. I’ve set my port in the port field and my Principal URL to http://server.domain.com/principals/groups/my_group but it doesn’t work!
Anyone figure this out
David on March 15th, 2011 at 3:28 pm says:
Server HTTP error 404
I so wanted this to work! Hopefully someone will figure this out and post here.
osxupgrade on March 15th, 2011 at 5:54 pm says:
Not sure why you’re getting the 404. I’ve got this working on three client machines with no issues. Hopefully someone smarter than I will post a solution!
petr on March 15th, 2011 at 10:20 pm says:
@Mike try port 8080
Diadian on March 23rd, 2011 at 9:45 pm says:
Just wanted to say thank you. It took me a few hours but I finally got it with this pages help. I wasn’t working on getting iPhones to see the addresses, just OS X clients.
Marcus on April 28th, 2011 at 3:41 am says:
Please tell me that your 404 errors aren’t showing up because you forgot to change you-server-address to your actual server address.
If it is I’m probably gonna laugh all afternoon
Jasper Lawrence on May 3rd, 2011 at 7:46 am says:
the 404 error goes away if you replace the domain name with the IP address if you are inside a firewall. As in, instead of http://files.yourdomain.com:8800/… 10.0.1.1:8800/…
Jasper Lawrence on May 3rd, 2011 at 7:51 am says:
Is it possible to make the shared address book editable from a client? I am very new to this and would like all users to contribute useful contacts to the shared address book on the server. We are a very small company. But it looks like I cannot write to the server, just read records, using my client AddressBook. On the server there are no records yet because I have not worked on exporting my local records and importing them to the address book on the server.
Help anyone?
Thanks,
Jasper
AJvK on May 27th, 2011 at 11:11 am says:
@Jasper Lawrence: you are correct in that using the server’s IP address instead of the domainname gets rid of the -very annoying- 404 error. But that only works for local clients. How would this work for laptops and iPhones/iPads outside the LAN?
AJvK on May 27th, 2011 at 11:20 am says:
What I also found is that using the shortname for the group (all lowercase! i.e. abglobal instead of ABGlobal) will also eliminate the 404 error
I stumbled onto this trying to access https://domainname:8443/principals/groups/ABGlobal/ in Safari which wouldn’t work, whereas using abglobal got me onto the Principal Details page.
Hope this helps! It’s likely that this will also work for my previous question re. laptops, iPhones, etc.
MacMini Server deel 9: Addressbook « MacFeegle wha hae! on June 2nd, 2011 at 8:16 am says:
[...] Dit bericht is een vertaling (met aanvullingen) van dit artikel. [...]
AJvK on June 2nd, 2011 at 9:17 am says:
Well, here’s another hurdle: after setting up the CardDAV account on my iMac, iPhone and iPad, it seems that the mobile devices don’t play nice with the iMac. While I can create and edit entries on all devices, entries made on my iMac don’t carry over to iPhone or iPad. iPhone and iPad sync perfectly, but entries made on either of those don’t show up on the iMac… It’s like I’m working in two different addressbooks.
I’ve disabled the Address Book traffic forwarder in Mobile Access, but to no avail…
Lars on June 16th, 2011 at 5:50 am says:
It worked for me when I put the “AB Read-Write Group” in the “com.apple.server.globalSharedAddressBook”
Jorge on July 17th, 2011 at 1:50 pm says:
Thanks for the tutorial. I was still getting some error messages with your set up. Just in case others had issues connecting with the server after changing the server name to an ip address AND changing the group name to the short name (all lower caps), I discovered you need to go to SERVER ADMIN>SETTINGS>GENERAL and make sure the “Directory Gateway” has both Search for user accounts and Search for Shared contacts are CHECKED OFF.
I’m at the point where I can see the Global Address Book, I just can’t edit it to share info. Back to the drawing board but thanks for the head start.
Olaf Seifert on August 9th, 2011 at 6:44 pm says:
@Jackpod: You cannot use the iOS-built-in wizard for setting this up. You have to use iPhone Configuration Utility (free download at Apple’s), because one may enter the principal-URL only within those profiles. Trick: You may use a personal user account and a shared group account, simultaneously. You need an alias for the user to enter the second account for the server will treat both settings apart of each other. Say, users shortname in Workgroup Manager (Open Directory) is “benutzer”. Enter a second “shortname” which in fact is an alias like “ben.utzer” – then you can configure to accounts on iPhone for only one server-account. Use different principal-URLs – there you are.
MacMini Server deel 9: Addressbook [update: problemen] « AJvK.nl on September 23rd, 2011 at 12:36 pm says:
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Bruno Buck on October 11th, 2011 at 12:03 pm says:
I have one (and only one) client where I set up the AB app just like everyone else and when I create the account, the password field turns to blank. I try putting the password manually but it doesn’t sync with the server. I’ve already tried deleting and recreating the user under the server but didn’t work. Any ideas? Thanks in advance.
Adam on October 12th, 2011 at 1:53 pm says:
This is very slow for some reason after a few days of using it with 5 users. Any idea on how to get the speed up?
buck on November 23rd, 2011 at 9:32 pm says:
Why would anyone want to create a global address book ? I don’t want anyone knowing my contact list for all my hooker friends.
hawk on February 20th, 2012 at 1:05 pm says:
Is it possible to sync the global addressbook with google contacts?
Marc on April 16th, 2012 at 10:25 am says:
is there a way to share a group of an address book that is on a regular (non server) Mac over the internet (not a local connection)?